1.

The boy woke up from the first rays of sunlight hitting his face. As he rubbed his eyes he looked around and found himself in a strange land. He was in an open field with blades of grass brushing his knees. As he sat up and breathed in, he could smell the faint smell of burning wood and that sweet sickly smell of blood. He looked around and found a spear lying near him, He picked up the spear and got up. As he is getting up, he notices the bodies around him on the ground, all still and unmoving. Besides the bodies, there is a herd of bison grazing peacefully, unbothered by the bodies. As the boy started to get up and walk, it was quickly interrupted by a stinging pain on his thigh. He looks down and sees half an arrow sticking out of his leg caked with dry blood. He pulls it out wincing in pain and slathers tree sap on in to stop it from bleeding. As he walks through the field, the wind brushed his face which told of burning forests and screaming soldiers.

He walked all day through the fields passing thousands of bodies and bison alike. He is looking for something. The horizon seems to be getting smaller as he walks further and further and he finally sees it. With the last rays of sunlight, he sees the giant, thick trees in the distance. Above the trees, the sky was no longer red from the sunset but blackened from smoke. “They were burning them out”, he thought as he saw the bit of light in the distance signaling fire. As the last bit of light disappear, he laid down on the soft grass and slept.

In the morning he woke up and was startled by what he saw. A spear was right at his throat. With a long gray arm, that led to a faceless mask with only two holes for eyes. He knew who these people were and what they wanted. Then as soon as he opened his mouth, he saw the blue sky and then it went black.

“Man you didn’t have to do that, ” the first man said. 

“It doesn’t matter, he won’t die, we need him to know what their next move is”. “Are you sure it’s him, from the sun tribe”,

 “Yes, he is the one, you see his arm? It has the markings that show who he is, pretty clever I must say, since it is a code for telling which rank he is as well, too bad for them we figured it out”.

As these soldiers kept talking, the boy heard it all and was ready to spring into action, he just needed a little luck. A distraction had to appear, which would mean his chance to escape. For a while nothing happened and he thought that he might need to make his own distraction. He opened his eyes just a bit and risked a peak. They were carrying him on top of a stretcher and as he looked around he saw that one of the soldier’s daggers was about to slip out of its sheath. All he had to do was tap it somehow. To his luck, the soldier stepped on the uneven path and his dagger slipped out. “Hey stop, I need to pick up my dagger, let’s just set him down for a second”, 

“Well hurry up” said a second one.

 As soon as he bent over the boy got up and kicked him in the head from behind, took his dagger and threw it to the soldier nearest to him. His surprise attack bought him a couple of seconds to run from them. His captors now became his pursuers as they chased him through the thick grass. The boy could see the line of trees that ran next to the grasslands. He angled that way and started to run through the thick jungle. His pursuers had no chance catching him as he gained some distance, he scrambled up a tree and prayed that they didn’t see him. They ran past the tree he was hiding in and in no time they were gone.

 “Sooner or later they are going to notice there are no tracks”, the boy thought to himself.

 “I have to get out of here”. As he started his climb down, a hummingbird started buzzing around his hand. There by his hand was an orange flower and the humming bird sweet nectar. His mother, he thought about his mother, who said that she would become a hummingbird when she was reborn.

2.

“Who are they mama? ” asked a young boy.

  “Don’t look at them” said a tall woman.

 The boy looked at these strangers, perplexed by their image. Compared to the villagers from there, these men were huge, the shortest ones having about a foot on the tallest one. Their skin was different too, not brown, but a dead fleshy gray. They all wore masks, faceless masks with only two holes for eyes.

 “We need to search your house” said one of the men as he approached the woman. 

“Why? Leave us alone.” She retorted.

 Without hesitation the man clubbed the woman with his fist which unlike the rest of his skin was red and the knuckles blackened and bruised. They stormed in the house without permission and took to wrecking everything and taking anything valuable. They then burned the house down, with the woman inside. The boy ran out as he watched all this and ran towards the mountains. He hid there and not until he got away he cried. His father was gone and hadn’t come back for months and now her mother. He had nothing and no one left. He cried because these gray men burned down his village, his home, and his mother. But most of all he cried because he knew who these men were, they were from the cloud tribe and had just declared war on their tribe, the sun tribe.

 All the other tribes had formed a coalition to destroy these gray men, everyone from the gray tribe, to deep in the jungle where the forest tribe was and then up as far as the rain tribe. Everyone was fighting for their freedom, but with famine and disease, it was hard to keep these people out. They also had better weapons, metallic swords and spears, long staffs that made loud bangs and tore soldiers to shreds from far away. Everyone else was just using spears and daggers made from wood and rock. 

The boy woke up and didn’t know where he was. The faint smell of burning wood made him remember the events of the day before, but instead of crying he got up with a fire lit under his eyes. He ran out of the forest to his village. It was burned down, gone, every inch of it. They weren’t here anymore, but the other citie’s reinforcements were here with their paddle boats. 

They stepped out of their boats and found the boy sitting in front of his burnt down house which was now embers. An old man picked him up, took him to his boat and took him to one of the sun islands where he adopted him into his home. 

From then on, this man became his teacher and for years the boy learned. He taught him all about the fighting techniques, hunting and surviving in the jungle. He was a great teacher but not a great father. He was very mean, cruel and unforgiving, which he thought would settle in the boy. This never happened, the boy just smiled always and kept his spirits up. He vowed to himself not to become so cold, distant and unforgiving to people and the world. But he never forgot what he was fighting for, which had lit a flame in his heart. Everytime his teacher knocked him down, he got up stronger with a bigger vengeance. Finally, after he passed his final test which was very easy for some reason, he became a warrior for his tribe.

3.

An old man was climbing up a hill. He did this every morning before the sun rose, before the earliest of early birds sang their song.

 At the top of this hill he sat on a rock like he always did, but today something felt different. He felt someone here with him. Standing in the shadows not far behind him was a boy.

 “Are you going to kill me?” the old man asked the boy.

 “You know the answer to that question already”,

 “Yes I do” said the old man. 

He knew today was the last time he would get to hear the birds sing to the rising sun. “Before I kill you I want to ask you why, what is the reason for your betrayal, why leave our tribe and fight for them?”.

 The old man recalled the day when he left his family behind to fight in the war. He thought about the tears and burns and bruises and the backstabbing. 

“I love my people, I know who they are, how they act and how they think. I know everything there is to know about them, but when you were born, there was something different about you. Everything looked the same, you looked the same as everyone else, but your heart, it was on fire. This was the first sign of something great that was to come”.

The old man paused and looked far away. Recalling these memories brought back joy which was followed by a feeling of sadness.

 “I talked to an old man who was the general of our entire tribe’s warriors. All he said was to wait and see what was to become of me. He told me he would take care of you and train you to be the best warrior these lands had seen. So I did. The few years I was with you, some miraculous things began to happen. One day you roamed too far from your mother and you fell into a ravine. When we finally found you at the bottom, you were unscathed, I mean the fall should have killed you, or at least broken your legs. This is when I knew that this sign I wondered about was real.” 

The boy had recalled that day, he wasn’t just wandering, he was playing hide and seek with his friends. 

“Soon after this I had to leave you and your mother to protect our lands. One day, on a clear sunny day, we got ambushed. It was the most unexpected thing ever and they caught us by such a surprise that none of us had even time to pick up a weapon.They put us in a cage and brought us back to one of their outposts.”

 The old man got up and faced the horizon in the direction of the rising sun. He took a deep shuddering breath and continued his story, 

“There we were given a choice, we could either get executed, or help them find the rest of us. Everyone opted for staying loyal to the tribe, but when it came my turn, I got scared. I was weak and afraid of what might happen and I asked them for a deal. If I helped them, I would get to stay alive, but also keep you and your mother alive. I was afraid of going away to fight and never getting to see you again.” 

The old man paused and looked up at the sky. The very first rays of light were beginning to peek in through the horizon. 

“Once I heard that the village had been burned to the ground, and your mother with it, I felt enraged with a deep sense of despair knowing that I had been fooled. I had been tricked into believing that they would keep you safe, or atleast alive. That day after I heard the news of the village, they gave a choice. I could be executed or become a strategist in their military. I am the best fighter they have and I know these lands far better than them. So I chose to teach them. I betrayed my people once more. As the years passed, I began to age very rapidly. I later found out that they would poison my food and water with some sort of very increased rapid aging substance. I then heard about you, the warrior that would slay hundreds, despite being fired at, despite having arrows stabbing you in the back and deep cuts were swords traced their paths in your skin. I knew this was you and I knew that you would go for the moon territory, which is where you belong, ontop that mountain. I then concentrated my entire focus on not only stopping you from getting there, but also taking the land for ourselves. The moon tribe is mysterious, and its people are driven by an invisible magic. Hundreds of men were slayed in the entrance of their valley. In the end it didn’t matter, you still got here and you will kill me anyway, but you’ll never win this war son.” 

The boy picked up his spear and started walking towards the old man. He had listened to enough of what he said.

“You may call me your son, but you stopped being my father a long time ago. You weren’t my father anymore the day you walked away from our tribe and from our family. You killed my mother even though your intentions may not have been otherwise. You are the reason why this war feels impossible to win.”

With those last words, the boy put his spear through the old man. He took one last look at the sunrise and just as the day started, his life ended.

4.

The boy looked up at the sky. It was black. For a second he thought he saw a twinkle of light in the distance, but it was soon drowned out by the darkness around him.

 “I must be dead,” the boy thought. 

He tried to look around him but his head was fixed in place and so was his body. A voice appeared in the darkness which said 

“You aren’t done. You haven’t fulfilled your life, but once life is taken away, it cannot be given back. A second chance cannot be given. Being careless is the downfall of you and your people. This will be the last bloodline of them, not only from being the fire tribe, but the moon tribe as well. Some tribes may continue to survive but are very hidden in the shadows of the wilderness. You couldn’t save your tribe, or any of the others because you died in the middle of your doing so.” 

The boy heard these words and knew immediately that they were wrong. He hadn’t been careless, or wreckless, in fact quite the opposite. He was so precise and meticulous with his planned attacks, on the battlefield he took the biggest precautions so whoever was speaking to him was lying to him. He had died on the battlefield to save his people from being skinned. The boy tried to tell this to the voice but it soon interrupted by telling him that

 “you are quite attentive and know that you died valiantly on the battlefield protecting your people. We have never given a second chance to a mortal, but you are more than that. Blood of the gods runs through your veins right now and it is not like them to leave such a weapon unused. They have granted you a second chance to save your people. So go, go back out there and save them” 

and with that the boy zoomed through the darkness that was being overcome with light so bright it blinded the boy. 

When the boy opened his eyes he was no longer worth the darkness, but within a field of reeds with the sun at its highest. An arrow was sticking out of his chest that went straight through his heart. He pulled it out, no pain and no blood. The boy got on his knees and kissed the ground. He truly had been blessed by the gods. 

“Now I must finish ou battle” the boy said.